


Tailor Paul and Piffling Peter

by Adina



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-22
Updated: 2006-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:11:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adina/pseuds/Adina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles has a case, Peter has a past, and Harriet has a bright idea.  Mostly piffle, I'm afraid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tailor Paul and Piffling Peter

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Jae Gecko for making me go back and fix the talking heads and unattributed dialogue.
> 
> Written for Atalan

 

 

The sitting-room at Talboys looked exactly as it should, Lady Peter (nee Harriet Vane) thought with abominable complacency. Only the oak-settles and the eight-day clock, bought back from the brokers by Peter, remained of Noakes's furnishings, and they pre-dated his foul excrescences. The rest of the furniture was an unlikely mixture of sturdy farmhouse comfort and Georgian elegance. A cozy fire burned in the fireplace, the dramatically cleared chimney drawing as sweetly as even Mr. Puffett could boast.

Peter completed the domestic interior, seated at a delicate mahogany secretary answering a letter from Charles, though whether from the chief inspector or the brother-in-law she couldn't say. His back was towards her, alas, but she had admired his spine a time or two before, and no doubt would continue to do so until it was bowed with age and after. His head was bent over his letter, occasionally rising as he consulted Charles's. Less industriously, Harriet sat on the sofa, _The Luck of the Bodkins_ hanging limply from her hands.

Peter must have felt the weight of her eyes on him, for he turned to face her. "Charles has a deuce of a problem," he said with a not terribly sympathetic chuckle, "which he claims is entirely my fault." She made appropriately encouraging noises; Peter was better than Wodehouse at his best. "A number of young ladies in London have lost rather large sums of money, though they tend to be vague to the police about the circumstances. For his sins Charles has been assigned a case where the victims are the least willing to aid the investigation."

"Ah?" In only one crime were the victims as eager to conceal the offense as the perpetrator. "Blackmail?"

"More than likely." Peter's face was abstracted, making some association with the case, she suspected. She had always loved how mobile his face was when he dropped his mask of foolery. Bertie Wooster was gone and Sherlock Holmes had taken his place.

She waited until he focused again. "How is this your fault?"

Peter chuckled again. "The social position of the victims argues for a discreet investigator, at least in the minds of their closest relations. Charles claims that his association with me has linked him with the upper crust in his superiors' minds, where before he met me he was too bourgeois for a case of this sort."

"I should think Lady Mary has rather more to do with that than you," she said dryly.

"No doubt, no doubt," he snickered. "Safer to blame the brother-in-law than the wife, don't you think?" He sobered again. "Blackmail is the very devil. The criminal gets a few years penal servitude while the victim's life is ruined."

At least no one had profited from shredding her reputation, she had done it all herself. If Urquhart had helped by murdering Philip, well, he was dead and buried in Newgate Prison. She shook off the past; despite Peter's amusement at Charles's predicament there was little doubt he would be drawn into the case, frustrating as it might become. "Couldn't Miss Climpson--"

Bunter coughed apologetically at the door. "Excuse me, my lady, my lord. There is a man here with a package for your lordship. He insists that you sign for it yourself."

"With a slow and noiseless footstep comes that messenger divine?" Peter asked.

"Indeed, my lord. I'll bring him in, my lord," Bunter said without so much as a twitch of his lips.

"Crushed!" Peter exclaimed with a languid hand to his anguished brow.

Harriet laughed. "It's a wonder you haven't driven Bunter to distraction."

"Bunter is made of much too stern a mettle to be affected by my poor efforts," Peter said in mock sorrow. "But hark! The weary wanderer returns!"

The messenger wasn't a London man if Harriet was any judge. Something indefinably countrified about his clothing suggested a village garage man rather than a professional messenger, unlikely to have been sent by Charles with evidence related to his letter. The man presented a small, flat box about the size of a book without giving it over.

"You need to sign for it, m'lord," he said in an accent equally countrified.

"Quite all right," Peter said, taking the paper he extended and scrawling his name across the bottom. He handed it back, trading it for the package. Turning the package over in his hands, he examined it with evident mystification. Even from where she sat Harriet could see it was bare of address or markings. "Bunter, why don't you take Mr.--" He raised a brow at the messenger.

"Smith," the man provided.

Peter's mouth quirked. But of course lots of people were called Smith or it would be a useless alias. "--Mr. Smith to the kitchen and give him a glass of something." He gave Smith a vague and cheery smile. "Long, dry drive from...Ely or thereabouts?" Somehow it was no surprise that Peter could trace the accent to Cambridgeshire when all she could tell was 'not London.'

"Thereabouts," the man agreed. "Can't say I'd mind a drop or two, m'lord."

"Capital!" Peter gave Bunter a look and received a nod in return. "Off you go, then."

Bunter led the man off to the kitchen, where, no doubt, he would ply the man with beer and keep him to hand should further questions arise about his package.

"It's not ticking," Peter said, examining the package rather more carefully. "That's usually a good sign according to Charles." Despite his words he didn't sound concerned.

Harriet crossed to stand beside him. It was an entirely unremarkable package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. "I'm afraid booby trapped packages are rather out of my line," she said. "It always smacked of too much melodrama."

Peter laughed. "It does, doesn't it?" Drawing a penknife he cut the string. "Fortunately most ordinary criminals seem to agree with you." He slit the paper to reveal a hinged box. "Not that I would be inclined to eat or drink anything delivered in this manner," he added as he opened the box.

A fortune in emeralds in an old-fashioned setting met their gaze.

"A trifle rough on the teeth, I should think," Harriet said after a moment. The corner of Peter's mouth twitched up, but he continued to meditate on the stones in silence. "Is there a message?" she asked.

He lifted the necklace out of its box, letting it swing free between his hands; sunlight caught the stones, throwing sparks of green fire around the room. "The emeralds are the message," he said enigmatically. "I believe a lady of my acquaintance is reminding me that her birthday was three months ago."

Three months ago Crutchley had still been awaiting execution. "If that's the penalty, I might forget a few birthdays myself," Harriet said as lightly as she could manage.

"We could start a new tradition, with the celebrant giving gifts on his birthday rather than receiving them," Peter suggested.

"And a happy unbirthday to you," Harriet said. Two could play this game: if he would not tell, she would not ask.

"Alas, all new ideas are old," Peter said. He continued to gaze at the emeralds, without appearing to see them. At last he looked up. "Apropos of nothing, the weather is supposed to be remarkably fine the rest of this week. I thought you might like to take a little drive with me tomorrow." The pitch as a little too abrupt, but a good shot over all.

"A fine day in February should not be wasted," she agreed blandly. She pretended to think for a moment. "I've heard that Ely Cathedral is supposed to be quite magnificent," she suggested. "Perhaps we should head that way."

"East Anglia is noted for its ecclesiastical architecture," Peter said, equally blandly. "Both Ely and--thereabouts."

His apparent carelessness for her feelings was oddly reassuring, because careless was most emphatically something Peter was not. "If this were a novel, your mystery lady would turn out to be your mistress or your natural daughter," she mused out loud.

Peter started, then laughed. "Ah, but which?" If she had had any doubts, Peter's reaction would have allayed them.

"Well," she considered. "If I spent two hundred pages agonizing over the mistress, it would be the illegitimate child, of course." She knew about some of Peter's adventures, but that was the dead past, though perhaps not quite as dead-and-buried as Philip.

"Of course," Peter agreed easily. "And vice versa?" He might have been asking about the plot of her latest novel, currently languishing half-written.

She laughed. "Oh, no! No one is reassured by a lover, even an ex-lover, not in novels." The introduction of the prior love interest was the precursor to acrimony and heartbreak if not actual murder, though she had never tried that plot herself.

"She could be Gerald's daughter," he offered after a moment. "He's fool enough, I suppose."

That had occurred to her, though the casual way he suggested it was enough to discount it. "That still doesn't explain the necklace, I'm afraid."

"Too true." Peter thought for a moment before his face lit with triumph. "Ah! The necklace belonged to my late sister--"

"Who unaccountably fails to appear in Debrett?" she asked, hiding a smile behind a skeptical expression.

"Hush, you," Peter scolded. "Who was cruelly cast off by my father--" His raised brow invited her to join his invention.

"--after her scandalous marriage to a Russian playwright--" She could see him: tall, dark, and morose, standing beside a younger, slighter version of Mary.

Peter nodded his approval. "--leaving her widowed and destitute after the revolution--"

"--so she returned to England with her infant daughter--" Because the daughter had to come into it somewhere.

"--and--" Peter's brow furrowed. "Why didn't the silly clutch sell the necklace to finance a new life for herself and my darling niece?" He sounded genuinely aggrieved with his fictitious sister.

"Maybe your father withheld it from her inheritance from your Delagardie grandmother?" Harriet suggested. What she had heard of the 15th Duke of Denver was not entirely positive. She could imagine him coming over the stern pater familia.

"Of course!" Peter smiled again. "How could I have forgotten? Gerald and I found it after his death, but when we went to restore it to her we found her wane and on the point of death--"

"--pale and ethereal, lying like an angel already against the pure white counterpane--" Since they were moving firmly into the realm of Victorian melodrama anyway....

"--but she died at peace after hearing our promise to raise and educate her daughter, restoring the necklace to her on her twenty-first birthday," he concluded triumphantly. He held the necklace aloft. "Alas, the lady scorns her birthright."

Their joint invention would make a novel--a very bad novel. "Exceedingly tidy."

"And every word is true," he said with a self-satisfied smirk.

***

Reality was nearly as absurd as the story they had concocted, Harriet thought, leaning back in her chair to smoke a meditative cigarette while Peter and the twenty-one-and-three-month old Hilary Thorpe argued over possession of several thousand pounds worth of jewelry that neither wanted.

The necklace had been stolen before Miss Thorpe's birth from Mrs. Wilbraham, a wealthy old woman, by Miss Thorpe's grandfather's butler. Miss Thorpe's father had compensated Mrs. Wilbraham for the loss with money he couldn't afford, and after his death the emeralds had been recovered by Peter through a chain of circumstances of which Harriet was still unclear. Mrs. Wilbraham had then died, leaving her considerable fortune to Miss Thorpe and the disputed emeralds to Peter.

"My father beggared himself to pay for that thing," Miss Thorpe repeated, though Harriet doubted she knew what poverty really was. "I won't wear his albatross around my neck as temptation to more thieves, to ruin any host foolish enough to have me as a guest!" The image was a confused one, the wording awkward, but maybe the young woman was more eloquent on paper. Peter had said she had ambitions to be a writer, after all.

Peter seemed rather amused by the situation. "I rashly promised that we could dispose of it when you turned twenty-one," he said, surrendering without a great deal of reluctance. "It should be easy enough to sell; the only question is what the money should be used for." He spread his hands. "The Wilbraham Estate Disposal Committee is open for nominations."

Miss Thorpe didn't answer immediately. "You could sponsor a scholarship for your college," Harriet suggested. The girl had been at Cambridge, but she didn't suppose that women's colleges there were any more well-endowed than those at Oxford.

Miss Thorpe was shaking her head. "It can't be anything that horrid old woman would approve of." The girl definitely had a grudge against Mrs. Wilbraham, not that Harriet could quite blame her.

"That makes it trickier," Peter said, though Harriet thought he rather approved. "Orphanages in Africa are right out, I presume?" Miss Thorpe nodded. "I object in principle to the Soviet Club, as much for their dress and manners as their professed desire to hang the likes of me from lampposts." From Miss Thorpe's wide-eyed expression the Soviet Club was rather more scandalous than she had planned to go.

Scandal. Harriet felt a broad smile suffuse her face. "I think you should give the money to the Cattery."

Peter looked doubtful. "I'm sure Mrs. Wilbraham would be suitably appalled if she knew, but--" He hesitated.

"But the Cattery is your pet project and doesn't need anyone else's help?" Harriet asked. He gave a slightly shame-faced nod, a child caught refusing to share his toys. "Ah, but Miss Climpson will need both Miss Thorpe _and_ her money to track down Charles's little problem."

Peter's mouth formed an O before flattening into a smile. Miss Thorpe looked from Harriet to him and back with a mixture of confusion, alarm, and dawning interest.

"Peter's Cattery employs what the politicians like to style 'redundant females,'" Harriet said. "They investigate those scams and blackmail schemes that so often escape the police's notice." Harriet hid a smile as Miss Thorpe leaned forward in her chair. It hadn't escaped the girl's attention how much grist for a would-be writer's mill such an occupation would provide. "They also help Peter in any of his investigations that need a female touch," she added, baiting another hook.

"Charles--Chief Inspector Parker--m'brother-in-law--he has a blackmailing case that is rather above their usual touch," Peter took up the baton. "Someone young, wealthy, in London for the first time, discreetly indiscreet--"

Miss Thorpe was trying not to look as interested as she so obviously was. "Mrs. Wilbraham would have kittens."

It was the ultimate encomium.

***

 


End file.
